The Great Hurricane
Written by Edward Thomas
The year 1893 was momentous for tropical storms in the United States, with 12 tropical storms impacting our nation’s shores.
Five became substantial hurricanes. Two of the five caused major death tolls of more than 2,000 people – a mark that to this day, 130 years later, keeps them on the list of “Top 10” deadliest storms in American history.
One of those storms – the “Great Sea Islands Hurricane” — roared over Beaufort County and is believed to have cost the lives of upward of more than 4,000 individuals living on coastal islands between Tybee Island, at the mouth of the Savannah River, and Sullivan’s Island, at the entrance to Charleston Harbor.
The hurricane destroyed Beaufort County’s economy, plunging it into economic despair for five more decades.
Here’s a look back at the devastating storm.
Storm Surge
It was Sunday, Aug. 27 1893, when the mammoth, slow-moving hurricane, called a cyclone in those days, rumbled onto Tybee’s shores. Fierce winds shrilled at 120 mph, but the rising waters were worse. It was precisely 12 years to the day that the lethal Hurricane of 1881 had hit the exact same island, leaving 700 people dead including 335 killed within the city limits of Savannah.
This time the storm veered more northerly onto Daufuskie Island, Hilton Head Island, Parris Island, Lady’s Island, the towns of Port Royal and Beaufort, Fripp Island and St. Helena’s Island. Within 24 hours Beaufort County was left in shambles.
The storm’s surge wiped out the county’s then-successful economy which was based on farming (including cotton and rice) and the mining of phosphate used in fertilizer.
Only 30 years earlier phosphate had been discovered along the Coosaw River and its tributaries which intersect the northern stretches of the county. At that time 60% of the phosphate produced in the United States came from South Carolina and half of that was just in Beaufort County.
No Warning
Unlike today, when technology sends out hurricane warnings many days in advance of landfall, there was virtually no warning for the 31,400 inhabitants of Beaufort County, 92.5% of whom were Black (according to the Census), — freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War less than 25 years earlier. For most of these native islanders, who typically lived alongside rutted dirt roads in wood-frame, low-to-the-ground houses with shuttered windows, there were few ways to escape or places to go.
Nonetheless, most locals had been through heavy rain events and tropical winds before, so even though the waterways were showing abnormal swelling and native birds and wildlife were reacting strangely to the plummeting barometric pressure, it’s understandable that so few believed this summer storm would be any different than others. As Sunday morning arrived in the city of Beaufort, there was a brief lull in the threatening weather.
But by late afternoon circumstances had dramatically changed.
The rising water preceded the strongest winds, which accelerated up to 130 mph or more as the storm pushed northward along the coastline. An article in “The State” newspaper on Aug. 29, 1893 called the storm, “The West Indian Monster” and detailed the destruction. It declared: “For eight or ten awful hours the hurricane held the country relentlessly in its clutches.”
The most frightful dilemma, however, was not the wind, but the rising Atlantic Ocean, which submerged every Sea Island between Savannah and Charleston with surges of 16 feet and higher.
It was a deathblow to thousands of native islanders.
Rare Atmospheric Phenomenon
Meteorologists today surmise the greatest calamity resulted from the storm’s timing, which coincided with a full moon “Spring High Tide,” that covered two separate high tides during its duration over Beaufort County.
Author Caroline Grego, in her meticulous book “Hurricane Jim Crowe,” quotes C. Mabel Burn, a woman who lived during the storm in a large house in The Point neighborhood of Beaufort and watched the storm arrive from her upstairs window. “Tide was due to be high at 5 p.m. she said, “but the wind increased in velocity and the tide was held up, and could not fall, so the next tide piled on top of the first.”
Recent scientific modeling by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has studied the 1893 hurricane and estimates because of the rare combination of a huge hurricane plus a full moon, a Spring Tide, and the Lowcountry’s shallow continental shelf, the storm surge may have been upwards to 25 to 30 feet in some places. For native islanders surrounded by the storm and the darkness, giant oak trees became their place of refuge.
Alice Louisa Fripp, the 18-year-old daughter of plantation owner John Fripp, recalls in her diary, how “we got tied off in the oak trees and held on most all night with the water waist deep all around.”
The book “Gullah Days,” which traces Hilton Head’s native islander history between 1861 and 1956, notes Broad Creek “turned into a raging river that nearly cut the island in half.”
Fran Marscher-Bollin and her late husband, William, wrote the book, “The Great Island Storm of 1893” and related one story about a St. Helena Island man who used ox chains to save his home. He put the chains out one window of his cabin, wrapped them around the trunk of an oak, put them back through another window and tied them together.
The Aftermath
By Monday afternoon the damage assessment was realized. Not only were bridges, buildings and other infrastructure demolished, but thousands were homeless and starving along the coast. Farmland was spoiled by saltwater intrusion. Bodies were washed up on the beaches and found strewn in piles across the marshes and creeks.
Human suffering was extreme. Thirty thousand people across the islands were homeless. Many were starving and there was only water from brackish wells to drink. There was virtually no help from government sources because of financial depression, and it took several weeks for the new Red Cross, under the direction of 72-year-old Clara Barton, to arrive. Their relief efforts continued for more than a year.
Marscher’s book notes that isolated Hilton Head Island was not reached for another month by relief efforts. Red Cross agent Dr. John MacDonald wrote the following: “I found 304 families, 1,285 people in need of assistance. ... there are a great many cases of malaria and the majority suffer from the effects of exposure. People are destitute of bedding and wearing apparel . ... In many cases their houses have been entirely washed away. ...people are sleeping in the open air on the ground.”
Although approximately 2,000 died as the direct result of the storm, Marscher says as many as 2,500 more died in the aftermath of injuries, malaria and other illnesses that the Gullahs called “storm sickness.”
